Upcoming events hosted by or involving Genetics Otago will be listed here. Please check back regularly for updates. A calendar of events that may be of interest to our members can be found at the bottom of this page and in the sidebar of other pages on this site, please note that this includes events hosted outside of Genetics Otago.
Career Evening
Unsure what you can do with a Genetics, Biochemistry, Neuroscience or Microbiology background? Come along and hear about some avenues from local graduates and employers.
Who should attend? This event is open to all 300 and 400-level students in Genetics, Biochemistry, Neuroscience and Microbiology, as well as interested postgraduate students. The event has limited spaces, please RSVP by Friday 15th September to secure your place at this event.
What the event involves? The evening will begin at 6:00 pm with short presentations from the guest speakers, followed by an opportunity to chat and network with the speakers over pizza. Details of speakers will be published here once confirmed.
Date: 25th September 2024
Time: 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Location: BI.G13, Biochemistry Building
Programme
A copy of the programme will be published here once confirmed.
Registration
Registration for this event is via Career Hub, please use the button below to be redirected to the registration page.
Calendar of Events
The below is a calendar of events hosted by GO as well as events hosted by others that may be of interest to our members. If you have an event you would like us to include please contact us here.
SEMINAR: Seeing evolution through a cladistic blindfold; the challenges of thinking about evolving lineages in a world of taxa
Tēnā koutou katoa
We are pleased to invite you to our first Genomics Aotearoa seminar for 2024, online on Friday, February 23 at 10am.
We welcome an international speaker to start the seminar series – Dr Ronald Jenner, who is Principal Researcher at the National History Museum in London. Ronald will be speaking to us live on “Seeing evolution through a cladistic blindfold; the challenges of thinking about evolving lineages in a world of taxa.”
Please note the 10am start time.
We encourage you to invite colleagues to join our genomics community and take part in this seminar. Look forward to seeing you there. Questions and discussions are welcome.
Join from PC, Mac, iOS, or Android:
https://otago.zoom.us/j/97097442106?pwd=RlczU3VCdFBmbmt4Yng4VW5OcHdSdz09
About Ronald Jenner
Ronald is Principal Researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, UK. He researches the evolution of animal venoms and the conceptual history of phylogenetics. He is the author of Venom. The secrets of nature’s deadliest weapon (with Eivind Undheim) and Ancestors in evolutionary biology. Linear thinking about branching trees.”
This online workshop is delivered by Genomics Aotearoa and NeSI, and will be taught from 10:00am-4:00pm NZT on Wednesday the 27th of March, 2024, and is for New Zealand researchers interested in learning to write scripts and submit jobs to an HPC using a scheduler. This workshop is an excellent follow-up for everyone who has recently completed the Introduction to R and Introduction to Bash workshops, although these are not strictly prerequisites. You are expected to have some knowledge of basic terminal commands.
Some of the topics covered in the workshop are:
– Designing a variant calling workflow.
– Automating a workflow.
– An introduction to HPC.
– Working with job scheduler.
Setup
This is a fully online, hands-on workshop. This workshop material will be run on the NeSI High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms – there is no need to install any software for this workshop. Instructions on how to access the NeSI HPC service will be sent out with the confirmation letter to registrants.
The material for this workshop can be previewed here.
Participants must have their own laptops and plan to participate actively. You will require a working web browser.
If you have any questions about these workshops, including whether they are suitable for you, please contact tyler.mcinnes@otago.ac.nz.
Tēnā koutou katoa
Please join us on Wednesday, March 27 at 4pm (NZDT) for the next seminar in the Asia-Pacific Genetics Seminar Series. Register in advance to receive an email with a link to the seminar.
Dr Shi Zhengli will be presenting on Surveillance and countermeasures against coronaviruses with potential spillover from wildlife.
Dr Shi is Professor Director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, Wuhan Institute of Virology (Chinese Academy of Sciences), and the Group Leader for the Emerging Virus Team.
Dr Shi focuses her research on the pathogen investigation of unknown viruses in wild animals and the interspecies infection mechanism of zoonotic viruses. She is in charge of the viral surveillance screening of bat samples, leading to the discovery and recognition of a wide-array of new SARS-like coronaviruses, adenoviruses and adeno-associated viruses in mainland China.
Her experience with bat coronavirus led to the rapid identification of the pathogen COVID-19 and its probable bat origin. Dr Shi won the 2018 State Natural Science Award of China (Second Class), and was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2019. She has served since 2017 as Editor-in-Chief for Virologica Sinica. |
The Asia-Pacific Genetics Seminar Series
The Asia-Pacific Genetics Seminar Series is a collaboration between the Genetics Society of Japan (GSJ) and the Genetics Society of Australasia (GSA). The quarterly seminar aims to further develop the field of genetics and promote international exchange among researchers in Asia and the Pacific.
Tēnā koutou katoa
We are pleased to invite you to our Genomics Aotearoa seminar, online on Friday, April 5 at 3pm.
We welcome Dr Paul Gardner, Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Otago. Paul will be talking on Should I trust my bioinformatic tools?
Please invite colleagues to join our genomics community and take part in this seminar. Look forward to seeing you there. Questions and discussions are welcome.
Join from PC, Mac, iOS, or Android:
https://otago.zoom.us/j/97097442106?pwd=RlczU3VCdFBmbmt4Yng4VW5OcHdSdz09
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Advance your skills with R! You will learn to complete R tasks with fewer lines of code, scale your analyses, and write readable code.
This online workshop is delivered by Genomics Aotearoa and NeSI, and will be taught from 10:00am-4:00pm NZT on Wednesday the 10th of April, 2024, and is for New Zealand researchers interested in advancing their skills with R.
This is an intermediate workshop, please check you meet the Prerequisites: Attendees must have introductory knowledge of R and be well versed in tidyverse (Intro to R + supplementary materials in that workshop). We expect that you will either have completed our Introduction to R workshop or have sufficient experience of your own.
Some of the topics covered in the workshop are:
– Introduction to relational data and the join function.
– Working with regular expressions and functions from the stringr package.
– Writing custom functions, working with conditional statements.
– ‘Defensive programming’.
– Iterations – for loops, and map_*() functions.
– The importance of data structure in R.
Setup
This is a fully online, hands-on workshop. This workshop material will be run on the NeSI High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms – there is no need to install any software for this workshop. Instructions on how to access the NeSI HPC service will be sent out with the confirmation letter to registrants.
The material for this workshop can be previewed here.
Participants must have their own laptops and plan to participate actively. You will require a working web browser.
If you have any questions about these workshops, including whether they are suitable for you, please contact tyler.mcinnes@otago.ac.nz.
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Introduction to spectral and traditional flow cytometry and data analysis (Session 1)
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Considerations for Spectral Flow Cytometry Sample Preparation (Session 1/2)
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Designing and optimising a multi-colour panel (Session 2)
Passcode: tPgUCh
This online workshop is hosted by Genomics Aotearoa and NeSI. The workshop will be taught from 10:00am-4:00pm NZT on the 16th of April 2024. It is for New Zealand researchers interested in progressing their abilities with Shell. The workshop will cover Shell overview, downloading and verifying data, inspecting and manipulating text data with Unix tools, automating file-processing.
This will include:
- An overview of the Shell, UNIX and Linux.
- Downloading data from a remote source and checking data integrity.
- Recap navigating files and directories, and commands used in routine tasks.
- Inspecting and manipulating data, part 1 (the head, less, grep, and sed commands).
- Inspecting and manipulating data, part 2 (using awk and bioawkto process text).
- Automating file processing.
- Challenges: solve example molecular biology problems using shell scripts.
This workshop assumes some familiarity with Shell. You will need to be able to do the following tasks via command line:
- Navigating files and directories.
- An understanding on full versus relative paths.
- Working with files and directories (examining files, creating, copying, moving and removing).
- Use a command line-based text editor such as nano.
And have a basic understanding of:
- File/directory permission in Linux.
- For loops (preferred, not required).
If you lack the above skills, you can use these sites as a refresher: Introduction to Command Line Carpentries lesson https://datacarpentry.org/shell-genomics/
Setup
This is a fully online, hands-on workshop. The workshop material will be run on the NeSI High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms – there is no need to install any software for this workshop. Instructions on how to access the NeSI HPC service will be sent out with the confirmation letter to registrants.
You can view the workshop material, including the objectives and content here.
Participants must have their own machine to work on and plan to participate actively in the workshop. You will require a working web browser.
Register for this workshop at Eventbrite.
If you have any questions about these workshops, including whether they are suitable for you, please contact tyler.mcinnes@otago.ac.nz.
Webinar
Ask The Experts: Hi-C Demystified |
How to Choose the Right Assay for Your Project |
Speaker:
Dr. Myriam El Khawand leads the customer success team at Dovetail Genomics and has been with the company for over 5 years helping customers achieve their research goals using Dovetail proximity ligation kits and analysis solutions.
What will be covered: |
3D genomics explores the influence that chromatin architecture plays in gene regulation. The primary method employed is Hi-C. With Hi-C coming in many flavors and forms, it can be overwhelming to know which assay is going to work best for your research goals.
Join us for this technical webinar where we will go into the ins and outs of the different Hi-C methods and chemistries, provide guidance on when to choose a particular option, and discuss the implications of that choice. Myriam’s presentation will include time for an in-depth QnA. |
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Introduction to spectral and traditional flow cytometry and data analysis (Session 1)
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Considerations for Spectral Flow Cytometry Sample Preparation (Session 1/2)
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Designing and optimising a multi-colour panel (Session 2)
Passcode: tPgUCh
Genomics Aotearoa is again holding its annual meeting of postdocs and early career researchers, organised by Training Coordinator Tyler McInnes. This year’s meeting in Wellington on May1-2 spans two days and includes a diverse spread of workshops and networking events.
More details to come.